FILM REVIEW; Forever Obsessing About Obsession

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: December 6, 2002

More than once in the week after I saw ''Adaptation,'' I found myself suddenly awake in the middle of the night, pulse racing, fretting over the movie's intricate, fascinating themes. Since quite a few of the films I see have a decidedly soporific effect, those bouts of insomnia might in themselves be sufficient grounds for recommending this one. But my sleeplessness was edged with panic; it seemed to mirror the frantic anxiety that the hero of ''Adaptation,'' a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman, suffers as he struggles to complete a script based on ''The Orchid Thief'' by Susan Orlean, a writer for The New Yorker.

At the paranoid hour of 3 in the morning, I wondered if Kaufman's towering writer's block might be contagious. As the deadline for this review approached, I pictured myself in his agitated state, pacing the floor in a sweat, muttering nonsense into a hand-held tape recorder and then desperately stalling my impatient editors: ''It's coming along. Really. You'll have something soon. No problem.''

I realize that the fear of contracting writer's block from a fictional character is crazy, but in the brilliantly scrambled, self-consuming world of ''Adaptation,'' which opens today nationwide, it has a certain plausibility. After all, one of the movie's reigning conceits is that the boundary between reality and representations of it -- between life and art, if you want -- is highly porous, maybe even altogether imaginary. Another is that obsessive manias -- for instance, the passion for certain forms of plant life that afflicts some of the characters -- reproduce themselves like madly pollinating wildflowers.

According to the credits, someone named Charlie Kaufman did indeed write -- or at least helped to write -- the screenplay for ''Adaptation,'' which indeed is billed as based on ''The Orchid Thief,'' the true story of a renegade horticulturalist, John Laroche. The encounters between Mr. Laroche and Ms. Orlean frame the book's excursions into Darwinian theory, Florida ecology and the history of orchid collecting. Many of these elements, by the way, are faithfully reconstructed in the movie. Mr. Kaufman's flailing attempts to honor the nuances and implications of Ms. Orlean's dense, elusive, intellectual mystery story are interwoven with a retelling of that story, until finally the two plots collide, overlap and blow each other to smithereens (along with the viewer's mind).

But all of this is much too straightforward. Yes, ''Adaptation'' is, most obviously, a movie about itself, as gleefully self-referential an exercise in auto-deconstruction as you could wish. But it is also, more deeply, a movie about its own nonexistence -- a narrative that confronts both the impossibility and the desperate necessity of storytelling, and that short-circuits our expectations of coherence, plausibility and fidelity to lived reality even as it satisfies them. Common sense suggests that there could never be such a movie, but if there could, it would have to be one of the slipperiest, most fascinating and, by any sane reckoning, best movies of the year.

In their first collaboration, ''Being John Malkovich,'' Mr. Kaufman and Spike Jonze, the director of ''Adaptation,'' concocted a deft and dizzy trompe l'oeil brain teaser that, for all its kinetic inventiveness, had a surprising sweetness and intensity of feeling. Like ''Adaptation,'' it was a movie about creative insecurity, misbegotten love and the traps of identity. Its characters were drawn together by an itchy desire to shed their own skins, a longing made hilariously literal by their discovery of a secret passageway into Mr. Malkovich's brain.

''Adaptation'' picks up, literally, where ''Malkovich'' left off: on the set of the earlier picture, where Charlie Kaufman skulks around in a neurotic funk. But while Mr. Malkovich, in a cameo, reappears playing himself (a role for which he won the best supporting actor award from the New York Film Critics Circle), Mr. Kaufman is played here by Nicolas Cage. And so is the second credited screenwriter of ''Adaptation,'' Charlie Kaufman's twin brother, Donald.

Mr. Cage and Mr. Jonze share a casual, daredevil sensibility, and the two of them -- or should I say the three of them? -- pull off one of the most amazing technical stunts in recent film history. It's not just that Mr. Cage plays two fractious, unsettled characters, who each become more complicated as the picture vaults and scrambles toward its conclusion, or that Mr. Jonze manages to place them seamlessly together in the frame. It's more that these acts of bravura seem to be no big deal. For much of the movie, you are watching a single actor portray a prickly, tender sibling dynamic with himself, and yet after a while this astonishing feat seems as matter of fact as color film or synchronized sound (which were once, of course, astonishments in their own right).

Although Charlie ridicules Donald's use of movie industry jargon (''Don't say industry,'' he snaps), Donald decides to try his hand at screenwriting. While his brother tears out his hair over ''The Orchid Thief,'' Donald churns out a serial-killer script so utterly derivative as to be a sure-fire six-figure sale (and sparks a happy, bawdy romance with a makeup technician played by Maggie Gyllenhaal).

He also attends seminars conducted by the screenwriting guru Robert McKee, whose rigorously structural approach to storytelling Charlie disdains. Later, in desperation, Charlie will turn to McKee, ripely impersonated by Brian Cox, for salvation, and will get an earful of self-help exhortation. ''For God's sake, don't use a deus ex machina!,'' McKee thunders, perhaps fully aware that he is one.

Meanwhile, Susan Orlean (played with impish composure by Meryl Streep) falls in with Laroche (Chris Cooper), a haunted, antic autodidact who has been arrested for poaching rare orchids from a Florida swamp. The contrast of their backgrounds and temperaments, hinted at in Ms. Orlean's book, is wittily realized by Ms. Streep and Mr. Cooper, whose lank-haired, toothless charisma also resonates with Mr. Cage's improbable magnetism.

As the stories unfold in counterpoint, seesawing back and forth in time, ideas pop up like flowers blossoming crazily in time-lapse photographs. It would be futile to try to account for all of them, but the effect is both exhilarating and a little stressful, like a graduate seminar in philosophy conducted by a slightly mad professor, and then edited down into an extralong episode of MTV's ''Real World.''

After it's over, you will want to keep arguing about it, if only in the relative safety of your own brain. The last part -- what McKee's acolytes might call the ''third act'' -- stages a formal death match between Donald's approach to storytelling and Charlie's, and sends Orlean and Laroche on to adventures undreamed of in the pages of The New Yorker (though they are, by Hollywood standards, perfectly predictable).

Some may find the ending rushed, inconclusive or cynical. I thought its lack of easy resolution was proof of the film's haphazard, devil-may-care integrity, and its bow to conventional sentiment a mark of sincerity.

At one point in ''The Orchid Thief,'' Ms. Orlean asks a park ranger named Tony why he thinks people find orchids so seductive. His answer matches both the nonchalance and the insight of this remarkable, impossible film: ''Oh, mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose. Besides, I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. I think everybody's always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help pass the time.''

Charlie Kaufman could hardly have said it better, though perhaps his brother Donald might have.

''Adaptation'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has scenes of sex, violence, drug use, evolutionary biology, flower abduction, journalistic indiscretion and many other things likely to trouble the sleep of neurotic, oversensitive viewers. Not that I have anyone particular in mind.

ADAPTATION

Directed by Spike Jonze; written by Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman, based on the book ''The Orchid Thief'' by Susan Orlean; director of photography, Lance Acord; edited by Eric Zumbrunnen; music by Carter Burwell; production designer, KK Barrett; produced by Edward Saxon, Vincent Landay and Jonathan Demme; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 112 minutes. This film is rated R.